Richmond Heights art classes take advantage of mini-grants

With the help of mini-grants from the Martha Holden Jennings Foundation, art students at Richmond Heights Secondary School have been busy this year.
On Tuesday, a mural designed by Richmond Heights students will be displayed at the Cuyahoga County Education Service Center.
“The mural, which was designed using middle school and high school art student designs, illustrates the global community concept of renewable energy sources and recycling,” secondary visual arts teacher Mary Nichols Brondfield said.
The 5-foot-by-10-foot mural was designed using acrylic paint with bottle caps glued on top of the image itself.
Brondfield said students have been working on the mural since the beginning of the school year. Twelve students are currently working on the mural, but the project combines ideas of students from seventh grade all the way through Art II students at the high school level.
“They looked at all the drawings and took the ones they liked,” Brondfield said.
The idea for the project came after students attended the Flip Your World! conference in April, which was co-hosted by Developing Global Citizens for Northeast Ohio and the Baldwin Wallace University Center for Innovation & Growth at the Cuyahoga County ESC.According the Cuyahoga County ESC website, the conference “brings together educators, students, business leaders, and cultural and community members to share knowledge and to explore those 21st century skills essential for success in education, careers and lives within our global context.”
The mural will be on display Tuesday along with works from other Cuyahoga County districts to show how the various schools have taken advantage of the grant funding they received.
Richmond Heights received $500 in funding for the mural project from the Cleveland-based Martha Holden Jennings Foundation. According to the foundation’s website, it supports “a wide variety of programs for students and teachers from preschool through high school. Some preference is given to programs that target under-served students and districts with fewer available resources.”
With another $1,000 mini-grant from the Martha Holden Jennings Foundation, Richmond Heights students will learn how to create travel books.
On Dec. 17, Art II and Advanced Art students will hear presentations from Cleveland artist Nancy Lick and Laura Martin, a linguist and book artist from Cleveland State University.
Martin’s presentation will focus on the history of travel in fiction and nonfiction books, while Lick will talk to the students about illustrating books.
The art students then will begin work on travel books of their own. Students can do research on a location or create a story of their own, Brondfield said.
The project is a combination of a text piece and an art piece and will follow the new Ohio Visual Arts Standards and Common Core Writing Standards.
The travel books will be displayed at a school function after completion.